Obama's Secret Wars: How Our Shady Counter-Terrorism Policies Are More Dangerous Than Terrorism AlterNet / By Fred Branfman .. 100 COMMENTS
There is domestic policy, the GOP are playing terrorist there, then there is foreign policy, where both parties are .. the article with MANY links ..
Obama should be held accountable for vastly expanding the military establishment's worldwide license to kill. July 11, 2011
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Although President's Obama's partial Afghan troop withdrawal announcement has received more attention, his June 29 "National Strategy for Counterterrorism" is of far greater long-term significance. This remarkable document states that the U.S. government intends to "disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al-Qa'ida and its affiliates and adherents," in the following "areas of focus": "The Homeland, South Asia, Arabian Peninsula, East Africa,Europe, Iraq, Maghreb and Sahel, Southeast Asia (and) Central Asia."
This assassination strategy is already operational in six Muslim countries with a combined population of 280 million: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, which has become a laboratory experiment for urban drone assassinations. The London Sunday Times reported a year ago that "President Obama has secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US special forces ... with American troops now operating in 75 countries." There are presently 60,000 Special Operations forces worldwide, with 7,000 U.S. assassins unleashed upon Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq. Lt.-Col. John Nagle (ret.), an enthusiastic assassination supporter, has correctly called these operations "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."
Obama vs. Petraeus in 2012
President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and rhetorical advocate of the Rule of Law cannot possibly reconcile his previously stated beliefs with his presently creation of an "industrial-size killing machine" that sees U.S. leaders unilaterally hunt, kidnap and murder any person anywhere on earth -- including "the Homeland" -- whenever they feel like it, without outside oversight or their victims enjoying any legal or human rights whatsoever. Whatever his personal beliefs at this point, the president likely hopes that this "counterrorism strategy" will help protect him from inevitable Republican attempts to blame him during the 2012 presidential campaign for the likely losses the U.S. will sustain in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the next 16 months. And normally principled liberal supporters like the Center for American Progress, which called the strategy "more efficent counterterrorism," may well have made the same calculation.
But this "counterterrorism" program not only formalizes extrajudicial state killing formerly associated in the public mind only with the Gestapo and KGB. It also drastically weakens, not strengthens, U.S. national security. The U.S. is bedeviled today precisely because previous presidents created long-term disasters by making disastrous short-term political decisions -- steadily escalating in Indochina to avoid defeat before the next election, creating al-Qaeda and allowing Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq to acquire nuclear weapons in the name of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, arming the Shah of Iran and then arming Saddam Hussein against Iran after the Shah fell.
It is true that America badly needs an alternative to occupying foreign lands. But a worldwide assassination program that motivates countless potential suicide bombers, weakens friendly governments, strengthens U.S. foes and increases the danger of nuclear materials falling into the hands of anti-Americanterrorists, is hardly more "cost-effective counterterrorism." On the contrary. It exponentially increases America's enemies while doing them comparatively little damage.
David Petraeus claimed success for his "counterinsurgency surge" in Iraq on the grounds that it reduced violence there. He has thus failed in Afghanistan by his own criteria, since his "counterterror surge" has seen violence increase by 51 percent over a year ago according to the U.N., and in Pakistan where militant activity has increased by more than 400 percent since he expanded U.S. war-making there after becoming Centcom commander.
Despite this, newly appointed CIA Chief Petraeus has now been tasked with expanding his failed counterterror policies worldwide. He will seek to integrate military and CIA assassination capabilities; vastly increase and make more deadly a drone airforce, both that of the CIA and a U.S. Airforce which alone plans to quadruple its drone force and now "trains more pilots to operate drones than to fly bombers or fighter jets"; and he will increase the numbers and geographic scope of 60,000 Special Operations assassins and their backup support.
Besides the state of the economy, the 2012 presidential election may well hinge on whom the public blames more for the losses likely to occur in the next 18 months in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Republicans are already blaming Obama, using Petraeus's manifest disloyalty to his Commander-in-Chief when he criticized Obama's partial Afghan troop withdrawal. It may well be that Obama's reelection will depend on the public learning the truth: that U.S. losses in the "AfPak theater" are due to Petraeus' reckless and irresponsible expansion of U.S. war-making into Pakistan after becoming Centcom Commander in the fall of 2009, and his failed shift from "counterinsurgency" to "counterterrorism" after taking over in Afghanistan in September 2010.
The truth is that Obama has been listening to his "Commanders in the field" for 30 months now, as the Republicans have demanded, and they have failed him. If Obama does lose the 2012 election because of the military's failures, he will have only himself to blame. Previous U.S. presidents, from Abraham Lincoln to Harry Truman, gained political strength by risking cashiering incompetent military officers. By promoting Petraeus, Obama has placed himself in a no-win situation, inextricably binding himself -- and his nation -- to the general's countless reckless misjudgements, strategic failures and such manipulations of the media as his recent false claim to have reduced violence 5 percent in Afghanistan.
Two months after David Petraeus' fateful decision to unleash "counter-terror" in southern Afghanistan, the international press (it was ignored in the U.S.) reported that the floor of Kandahar's only hospital was "on some days, filled with blood", and civilian casualties so exceeded its capacity that sick patients had to be transported to Pakistan for medical help. Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, close ally Britain's Special Representative to Afghanistan, stated that David Petraeus should be "ashamed of himself," explaining that "he has increased the violence (and) trebled the number of special forces raids."
"For Every Dead Pashtun Warrior, There Will Be 10 Pledged to Revenge."
Obama counterterrorism advisor John Brennan sought to package Obama's strategy as consisting of only surgical strikes on known al-Qaeda leaders, making the delusional and fanatic claim that in the last year “there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop.” In fact, Reuters reported 13 months ago that "the CIA received approval to target ... a wider range of targets in Pakistan's tribal areas ... in many, if not most cases, the CIA had little information about the foot soldiers killed in the strikes." The evidence clearly indicates that the U.S. has since conducted hundreds of strikes in Pakistan without knowing how many civilians were among the 1900 people it has murdered -- only 56 of whom were named as "al Qaeda and Taliban Leaders" by the strongly pro-drone Long War Journal.
If manned helicopter strikes in the middle of Baghdad, with pilots hovering over and discussing their targets, can murder a Reuters journalist for carrying a camera and a doctor trying to rescue him -- as revealed in the Wikileaks "Collateral Murder" video -- one can only imagine the drone-caused civilian carnage in remote areas of both Pakistan and Afghanistan that are inaccessible to the outside world.
The mentality behind counterrorism has been described by former head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center in 2005-6, Robert Grenier as "kill them before they kill you" -- a primitive law of the jungle mentality more appropriate to organized crime than a superpower which confronts a 1.8 billion strong Muslim world in which, for each of "them" the U.S. kills it creates exponentially more of "them" committed to killing "us."
This strategy is thus not only immoral and illegal, but poses a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. In return for killing a handful of "al-Qaeda leaders" it dramatically increases the ranks of potential anti-U.S. suicide bombers, weakens friendly governments, strengthens U.S. foes, and increases the risk of nuclear materials falling into unfriendly hands. Its basic premise -- that there is a fixed quantity of "al-Qaeda leaders, adherents and affiliates" whose death reduces the threat to the U.S. -- is simply wrong. As Cowper-Coles has explained, "for every dead Pashtun warrior, there will be 10 pledged to revenge." Former CIA counterrorism operative Michael Scheuer has stated that "Petraeus's 'decapitation' approach was also unlikely to work. 'The Red Army tried that for 10 years, and they were far more ruthless and cruel about it than us, and it didn't work so well for them.'"
Does it really make sense to kill a handful of top leaders, who can be easily replaced by often more competent deputies, at the cost of motivating entire populations to support killing Americans?
The latest example is Yemen where, the Washington Post has reported,"attacks on electricity plants and oil pipelines have left Yemen's economy on the edge of collapse, with the most damaging strike carried out in retaliation for a U.S. counterterrorism raid." After the U.S. assassinated a tribal chief's innocent son, he retaliated by cutting Yemen's main oil pipeline. By aiding Yemen's economic collapse, U.S. counterterrorism is increasing support for terrorism.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Pakistani militants focused almost entirely on their immediate surroundings. But now, as a result of U.S. war-making in Pakistan, former CIA counterterrorism chief Grenier has explained that "it's not just a matter of numbers of militants who are operating in that area, it also effects the motivations of those militants ... They now see themselves as part of a global Jihad. They are not just focused on helping oppressed Muslims in Kashmir or trying to fight the NATO and the Americans in Afghanistan, they see themselves as part of a global struggle, and therefore are a much broader threat than they were previously. So in a sense, yes, we have helped to bring about the situation that we most fear."
It was one thing for U.S. leaders in years past to murder and enslave defenseless Native Americans and Africans, impose vicious dictatorships throughout poverty-stricken Latin America, and kill 3 million Indochinese who posed no threat whatsoever to Americans. But it is quite another for the U.S. today to slowly and inexorably turn vast portions of the 1.8 billion strong and oil-rich Muslim world against it - especially nuclear-armed Pakistan which has already conclusively demonstrated how "counter-terrorism" harms U.S. interests far more than helps it.
U.S. Policy Increasing The Nuclear Danger in Pakistan
In the wake of Osama Bin-Laden's murder, Congress, the media and pundits have finally begun to awaken to the fact that, as John Kerry recently stated, "in many ways, the Afghanistan war is a sideshow to the main event, if you will, that is next door." But officials and pundits blame the problems in Pakistan entirely on a "Pakistani military (which views) the United States as a hostile force trying to perpetuate a state of `controlled chaos' in Pakistan and determined to `denuclearize' the regime," as Fareed Zakaria recently wrote. None have had the intellectual courage to admit that, given the paranoia and incompetence of Pakistan's leaders, U.S. "counterterrorism" policy has made the situation infinitely worse.
The current attempt to blackmail "main event" Pakistan into supporting U.S. military efforts in "sideshow" Afghanistan by withholding $800 million in military aid is only the latest example of the incoherence of present U.S. policy, and strengthens the case - as discussed below - for shifting to a focus on economic and social aid.
Pakistan has in many ways been a laboratory for counterterrorism, and U.S. experience there proves conclusively that any successes it has enjoyed are far outweighed by its failures. President Obama stated in his Afghan withdrawal speech that "together with the Pakistanis, we have taken out more than half of al-Qaida's leadership."
But, as I have been warning for two years now, the failures of U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Pakistan are so great that it is madness to extend this failed policy to the entire Muslim world. U.S. counter-terror policy in Pakistan has contributed to:
-- A vast increase in overall militant strength: While U.S. officials claim drone strikes are hurting Pakistani militants in tribal areas, in fact the Federation of American Scientists reports that "in less than a decade Pakistan has witnessed terror incidents increase almost fifty-fold." Though the CIA quintupled drone strikes in Pakistan to an annual average of 79 in 2009-10 from16 in 2004-8, it has not reduced violence. On the contrary, incidents of reported terrorism in Pakistan have quadrupled from an annual 2004-8 average of 470 to a 2009-10 annual average of 1723, with the number and seriousness of attacks skyrocketing even higher in 2011. Numerous reports indicate that drone strikes have driven jihadi forces further east into Karachi and then the Punjabi heartland where they are increasingly cooperating together and pose a growing danger to the Pakistani state. It has also increased the risk of suicide-bombers among the more than one million Pakistanis in the U.K., many with British passports able to travel freely to the U.S., whom David Cameron reported in Wikileaks cables were "radicalized" by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and have been presumably even more upset by growing U.S. murder of Pakistanis since.
-- A growing nuclear threat: U.S. counterterror drone strikes have contributed to 59 percent of the Pakistani people -- over 110 million people -- regarding the U.S. as their "enemy." While U.S. leaders continue to cavalierly disregard Pakistani public opinion, former U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson reported in the Wikileaks cables that because of the public's hatred of the U.S., the Pakistani government has refused to cooperate with the U.S. on safeguarding its nuclear materials. U.S. ignoring Pakistani public opinion has thus helped create the single greatest threat to U.S. national security today. "Despite its political instability, Pakistan ... has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear stockpile," the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently reported. And it is considered one of the most insecure by nuclear experts. Former Senator Sam Nunn, who heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, has said that "we are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe" in Pakistan.
U.S. policy has so angered the Pakistani military that the possibility of a pro-jihadi military coup is openly discussed in the N.Y. Times and in a new book by Bruce Riedel, who coordinated Obama's fall 2009 Afghan policy review and worked at the CIA when the Ronald Reagan armed Osama Bin Laden and supported Muslim extremist General Zia ul-Haq during the 1980s, the key U.S. foreign policy mistake leading to 9/11. Riedel's book describes in chilling detail precisely the "all-too-inevitable"disaster that current U.S. counterterrorism strategy could lead to. He writes that the "simplest way a jihadist Pakistan would emerge would be another military coup led by a general who shares the the worldview of Zia ul-Haq. A new Islamic Emirate of Pakistan ... would take control of the nuclear arsenal." Aligned with al Qaeda and armed with nuclear weapons, such a state would be a nightmare.
And, as he notes, there is precious little the U.S. could do in the event of such a coup: "U.S options to change the regime by means of a coup or assisting dissidents ... would be limited. The United States is so unpopular in Pakistan today that its endorsement of a politician is a kiss of death." And if the U.S. tried to invade,he writes, "the Pakistanis would of course use their nuclear weapons to defend themselves ... an invasion would be a mission from hell. There are no good choices." He also explores the possibility of another Mumbai-like attack on India from Pakistan, concluding that "sooner or later a Pakistan-based terror attack on India is going to lead to Armageddon."
Nothing illustrates the incoherence of U.S.-Pakistan policy more, however, than Riedel's next chapter. America's most oft-quoted expert on Pakistan and participant in U.S. policy-making actually proposes expanding the very policies -- drone strikes, pressure on border areas and attacks within Pakistan that have made a military coup an "all-too-possible nightmare scenario." His most striking proposal is that "Washington could specifically target ISI officers (by) taking action against their individual and corporate financial holdings." It is difficult to imagine any single action more likely to provoke the very coup that Riedel properly warns against. King's College professor Anatol Lieven has correctly written that "any US action that endangered the stability of the Pakistani government would be insane. Nukes could fall into the hands of terrorists, along with huge quantities of conventional arms." Yet Riedel proposes, and the U.S. government is today conducting, precisely such "insane" policies, making the prospect of an anti-U.S. military coup ever more likely!
"Counterterrorism" Harms U.S. National Security More Than "Terrorism
Although most Americans opposed postwar "communism," by the late 1950s they had concluded that the "anti-communist" overreaction -- including Joe McCarthy, loyalty oaths, blacklists, the House Unamerican Activities Committee and FBI spying on Americans -- posed a far more immediate threat to American democracy. Similarly today, while no one can doubt that "terrorism" poses a threat, it is already clear that today's U.S. "counterterrorism" crusade poses a far greater danger both to U.S. national security and American values by exponentially increasing those committed to murdering Americans.
The best way for the U.S. to fight terror in Pakistan is to end its drone strikes and violations of Pakistani sovereignty, and focus on effective economic and humanitarian aid. Perhaps then public hatred of the U.S. will be sufficiently reduced so as to allow for collaborative police work that targets terrorists effectively, and safeguards nuclear weapons.
A second priority for U.S. policy is to promote the Pakistani military's stated desire, according to former U.S. Ambassador Patterson, for "deterrence, dialogue and development" toward its enemies. The Pakistanis, unlike the U.S., will have to live with their adversaries for the rest of time. They should be supported in their efforts to reach accommodations with them.
A third priority would be to realize that effective economic aid, e.g. bringing a reliable supply of electricity to the tens of millions of Pakistanis who lack it, will advance U.S. interests -- including cooperation on nuclear materials -- far more than drone strikes. The Pakistan Tribune has reported that Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani believes that "America should also help Pakistan in addressing its problems, particularly the prevailing issue of loadshedding. He said the government was working on a war footing to resolve the issue of loadshedding ... The prime minister also said he had discussed with the US leadership the growing resentment against the local people due to rapid drone attacks on Pakistani territory."
And a fourth priority, of course, would be to accelerate the U.S. withdrawal from "sideshow" Afghanistan.
At present, however, U.S. "counterterror policy" is clearly on a collision course with reality. It can only be hoped that when U.S. leaders are finally forced to acknowledge the moral and strategic bankruptcy of their counterterrorism policy that the damage they have done will not be irreversible. Fred Branfman exposed the U.S. Secret Air War against Laos, wrote Jobs From the Sun, California's SolarCal strategy, and developed high-tech and "investment economics" as a Cabinet-level official for Gov. Jerry Brown, head of Sen. Gary Hart's think tank, and directing Rebuild America whose advisors included Larry Summers, Paul Krugman and Robert Noyce.
See also .. ZHUHAI, China—China is ramping up production of unmanned aerial vehicles in an apparent bid to catch up with the U.S. and Israel in developing technology that is considered the future of military aviation. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=60384011
FUCKING GREAT .. YET ANOTHER NEW ARMS WAR .. domestic use of drones in the USA ..
Pakistan’s Military Plotted to Tilt U.S. Policy, F.B.I. Says
Representative Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania was among the politicians who may have unwittingly received donations that originated from Pakistan's military. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Representative Dan Burton of Indiana is another politician who may have unknowingly received money funneled from Pakistan's military. Charles Dharapak/Associated Press
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and ERIC SCHMITT Published: July 19, 2011
WASHINGTON — Pakistan’s military, including its powerful spy agency, has spent $4 million over two decades in a covert attempt to tilt American policy against India’s control of much of Kashmir — including funneling campaign donations to members of Congress and presidential candidates, the F.B.I. claimed in court papers unsealed Tuesday.
The allegations of a long-running plan to influence American elections and foreign policy come at a time of deep tensions between the United States and Pakistan — and in particular its spy agency — amid the fallout over the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden at a compound deep inside Pakistan on May 2.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation made the allegations in a 43-page affidavit filed in connection with the indictment of two United States citizens on charges that they failed to register with the Justice Department as agents of Pakistan, as required by law. One of the men, Zaheer Ahmad, is in Pakistan, but the other, Syed Fai, lives in Virginia and was arrested on Tuesday.
Mr. Fai is the director of the Kashmiri American Council, a Washington-based group that lobbies for and holds conferences and media events to promote the cause of self-determination for Kashmir. According to the affidavit, the activities by the group, also called the Kashmiri Center, are largely financed by Pakistan’s spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, along with as much as $100,000 a year in related donations to political campaigns in the United States. Foreign governments are prohibited from making donations to American political candidates.
“Mr. Fai is accused of a decades-long scheme with one purpose — to hide Pakistan’s involvement behind his efforts to influence the U.S. government’s position on Kashmir,” Neil MacBride, the United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, said. “His handlers in Pakistan allegedly funneled millions through the Kashmir Center to contribute to U.S. elected officials, fund high-profile conferences and pay for other efforts that promoted the Kashmiri cause to decision-makers in Washington.”
A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy denied any connection to matter, saying, “Mr. Fai is not a Pakistani citizen, and the government and embassy of Pakistan have no knowledge of the case.”
Law enforcement officials said Pakistan used a network of at least 10 unnamed straw contributors, which Mr. Ahmad helped organize, to make the campaign contributions and donate the bulk of the Kashmiri Center’s annual operating budget. The ISI would reimburse them — or their families in Pakistan — for the donations, the officials said.
Most of the straw donors who made contributions to the Kashmiri Center and to politicians in the United States were identified only by code in the court document, though the investigation was continuing and eight F.B.I. field offices executed 17 or 18 search warrants related to other suspected donors on Tuesday, an official said.
The goal of the group, according to internal documents cited by the F.B.I., was to persuade the United States government that it was in its interest to push India to allow a vote in Kashmir to decide its future. The group’s strategy was to offset the Indian lobby by targeting members of the Congressional committees that focus on foreign affairs with private briefings and events, staging activities that would draw media attention and otherwise to elevate the issue of Kashmir — the disputed region between India and Pakistan that each country controls in part but claims entirely — in Washington.
The F.B.I. said that there was no evidence that any of the lawmakers who received campaign funds from Pakistan were aware of its origins, and it did not name any of the recipients.
However, a search in Federal Elections Commission databases for contributions by Mr. Fai showed that he has made more than $20,000 in campaign contributions over the past two decades. The bulk of his donations went to two recipients: the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Representative Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana.
Mr. Fai made numerous — though smaller — contributions to Democrats as well, including to Representatives James P. Moran of Virginia, Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and Gregory W. Meeks of New York, and $250 donations to the 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns of Al Gore and Barack Obama.
Mr. Ahmad also donated to Mr. Burton, records show. For at least 15 years, Mr. Burton has been a champion for Kashmiri causes in Congress, appealing to Presidents Bill Clinton and Obama to get more involved in attempting to mediate a settlement between India and Pakistan over the border region. He has also endorsed allowing the Kashmiri people to vote on their own fate.
Mr. Burton said he was “deeply shocked” by the arrest of Mr. Fai, because he had known him for 20 years and “in that time I had no inkling of his involvement with any foreign intelligence operation and had presumed our correspondence was legitimate.” He said he would donate the funds provided to his campaign to the Boy Scouts of America.
Both Mr. Fai and Mr. Ahmad also donated to Representative Joe Pitts, a Pennsylvania Republican who visited the region in 2001 and 2004, meeting with Pakistani and Indian leaders and calling for a cease-fire. He also introduced a resolution in 2004 calling for President George W. Bush to appoint a special envoy to help negotiate peace.
A spokesman for Mr. Pitts said he had donated $4,000 — an amount equal to the donations his campaign received from the two defendants — to local charities in Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
Among the evidence that Mr. Fai was working for Pakistan, the affidavit said, are annual budget requests he allegedly submitted to his handlers along with lists of accomplishments and strategic-planning documents. Other documents and intercepts showed that they sometimes quarreled over reimbursing him for the costs of trips or about contracts for which he had not gotten advance approval.
The board of the Kashmiri American Council comprises mostly physicians and lawyers from across the United States, and election records show that several board members have made significant donations to lawmakers who have championed peace in Kashmir.
Gulam Hassan Butt, a retired California physician and member of the council’s board whose name does not appear in the donor database, said in a phone interview that the council carried out a “regular, honest, open campaign” with lawmakers and the State Department to get the United States to help resolve the Kashmir issue.
He also said he was unaware of any money that Pakistan’s government might have provided to the Kashmiri American Council, but Mr. Fai did not inform board members about all the sources of the council’s revenue: “Where does he get the money?” Mr. Butt said. “I don’t know. Who gives him the money? I don’t know.”
Eric Lipton, Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting. Barclay Walsh contributed research.
Mohandas Gandhi visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to depart to Pakistan on Sept. 22, 1947. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, in May 2009. He was assassinated in January 2011. Rex USA
Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship.
By AATISH TASEER JULY 16, 2011
Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."
My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.
Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.
To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.
The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.
Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.
This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.
But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.
In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.
Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.
But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.
Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.
Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.
But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.
As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.
The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.
In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.
The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.
This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.
The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.
This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.
— Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.
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